Mackenzie
The tracker sits in an evidence bag on the dash between us, small, black, and professional, wire trailing off one end like a tail somebody cut. I've been staring at it for six miles.
Both rooms I've slept in since I landed in this county have been a broadcast. Every time I pulled in or pulled out, somebody's phone lit up with my coordinates.
The Riverview. The church. The cemetery road.
Every drive between them, timestamped and mapped, a clean little line drawing of my investigation handed to the man trying to end it.
I run the argument one more time. I've been running it since he pulled it off my wheel well and held it up in the lot light.
I can drive to Choteau. I can drive to Great Falls.
I can check into a motel sixty miles from here where nobody knows my name.
But I can’t do it for two reasons: mine is dead in a parking lot with a tow truck thirty minutes out and every motel between here and the interstate is a room with a heater and a flue and a detector that may or may not have a light on it.
Or I can go north with the man who found the thing, who read a rag in a vent in one circuit, who drove sideways into a frozen lot at midnight because he heard my room number on a scanner and did the math before his boots were laced.
The man whose name is still in my notebook, under a question I haven't answered.
"This is not me agreeing with you," I say.
He doesn't look over. "Noted."
"This is me agreeing with the tracker."
"Also noted."
"And if I find out you had anything to do with any of it, I will put you in a room with no windows and take you apart."
Now he looks.
One flat second, the headlights catching those dark eyes, and something in them that I would call respect if I were in any mood to be generous.
"I'd expect that," he says.
Then he looks back at the road, and we don't talk for the next fourteen miles, and neither of us turns the radio on.
"You live here?"
The words are out before I decide to let them go, standing in his front room with my duffel still in my hand, looking at three thousand square feet of timber and river rock and a stone fireplace big enough to stand inside.
The careful file in my head (ranch bunkhouse, functional, cold) bleeds out at the edges like a photograph left too long in the sun.
"Built it myself. Mostly." Holt sets my second bag down like it weighs nothing, which to him it probably does. "Took two winters."
"With what, spare time?"
"With what I had instead of a life."
He says it dispassionately and walks off toward the kitchen before I can decide if that was a joke.
I count the windows out of habit before I let myself look at anything else. Three in this room alone, all facing the drive, nothing facing blind. It takes me a second to realize I've already started running this house like a scene.
The floor is wide plank, honey-colored, worn soft in a track from the door to the stairs like a hundred years of boots already lived here instead of two.
A leather couch that's actually been sat in, not staged.
The chimney runs two stories up into a loft I can't see the top of, and I catch myself wondering what a man builds a house this size for when he lives in it alone.
I catch myself wondering it in the same voice I'd use on a suspect's bank statement.
Gus meets me at the hearth rug before I've made it three steps.
Nine years old, grey at the muzzle. He crosses the room low and fast like he's been waiting since the truck door opened.
A strange dog is supposed to stop at my knee.
He doesn't. He leans. His whole weight, every solid pound of cattle dog he's got, against the outside of my leg, looking up at me like I already belong to something.
"Traitor," Holt says from the kitchen, not looking over.
"He's got good instincts."
"He's got no standards left. First warm leg he finds."
I put my hand down without deciding to, and Gus pushes his head into it. I stand there, in a stranger's front room, scratching a dead man's dog behind the ears with my duffel still in my other hand. I hate how little it took.
I make myself keep moving instead of standing there with it.
The bookshelf runs the whole east wall floor to loft, and I go to it because it's something to read the man by and something to do with my hands that isn't touching the dog again.
Lonesome Dove, spine cracked white from rereading.
Field guides on birds and wildflowers and alpine rock, the kind of books a man buys because he wants the name of the thing in front of him, not because somebody assigned it.
Beside the shelf, a record player and a short stack of vinyl, and on top, worn soft at the corners from handling, John Coltrane. A Love Supreme.
"Coltrane," I say, before I can stop myself.
"Trane." He says it easy, a word he's said ten thousand times. "If you want to sound like you know jazz."
I don't say anything else about it. I put the word away instead of the record, because something in how he says it tells me it means more to him than an album does, and I don't want him watching me notice that yet.
The refrigerator gets me.
Stainless steel, professional grade, and stuck to the front of it with a horseshoe magnet, a single sheet of paper gone soft and curled from years on that door.
Crayon. A black truck, wheels too big, mountains scribbled purple behind it, a tall stick figure in a black hat with a hand the size of the truck's tire.
Underneath, in the careful backward letters of somebody just learning them:
UNCLE HOLT
"Whose?"
He comes to stand beside me, close enough that I feel the heat off him before I feel anything else. Then he looks at the drawing the way a man looks at something he's looked at a hundred times and still hasn't used up.
The black goes out of his eyes, dark brown gone warm and unguarded. It’s a color I haven't seen on him once since the airport.
"John's boy. Miles. Eight now." A beat. "Drew it when he was four. Wouldn't let me throw it out even after he got better at drawing trucks."
"Who's John?"
"Spotter. Ranger days. Lives in Butte now."
That's all he gives me, and it's more than he's given me about anything else in this house. A friendship that earns refrigerator space like this is data, whatever else it is.
"This isn't what I expected," I admit, because it needs saying out loud or it's going to sit in me and rot.
"What'd you expect?"
"A bunkhouse. Gun rack. Something that smelled like a man who doesn't own a couch."
"I own three couches."
"That's worse."
He almost smiles. I watch him decide not to let it finish and count it as a win anyway. Underneath the win, some other and less professional part of me notes exactly how close he's standing, and how long it's been since either of us moved.
He takes me to Nell's for lunch like it's a foregone conclusion. Like a woman doesn't get a vote on where she eats once she's moved onto Blackwater ground.
"I could've ordered for myself," I tell him at the counter.
"Didn't say you couldn't."
"You're standing there like you're about to."
"That booth sees both doors. You'll want it."
I want to argue and can't, because he's right. It's a cheap thing to give him, so I let him.
We're four bites into a lunch I didn't plan on enjoying when a man slides into the booth uninvited. Cologne loud enough to announce itself before he does, a smile built for somebody who's never once been told no.
"Agent Tatum." He says it like he's tasting it, and his eyes take the same slow trip down and back up that his voice just did. Unhurried, like he's got every right to the inventory. "Heard you're in town asking questions. Figured I'd save you the trouble."
The back of my neck goes tight.
I don't know his name yet, but I clock the truck through the window anyway, out of nine years of habit: a rental sticker, Montana plates, nothing on the doors at all. Men who work for McKenna don't advertise.
"I didn't ask you anything."
"You will." He leans in an inch too close, and my whole body goes to flat, professional stillness. The kind I've used on men exactly like him a hundred times. "Everybody in this county's got an opinion about the Blackwaters. Mine's the interesting kind."
I open my mouth to handle it myself. I've handled men like him alone in worse rooms than this one. But I don't get the chance.
Holt sets his coffee down.
He doesn't slam it, that's what I notice. It’s the thing that tells me more about him than a raised voice ever could.
He sets it down with exactly enough weight that the man across from me hears it land.
Then he stands, unhurried, all six foot four of him unfolding out of the booth like weather arriving. He doesn't say a single word.
Five seconds. That's all it takes. He stands there with his hands loose at his sides and his eyes on a man half his size, and the man's smile goes from confident to remembering something urgent in his truck.
"Didn't mean anything by it," he says, already sliding out, already gone. The door swinging shut on a cold gust that doesn't touch the temperature in this booth at all.
"You didn't have to do that."
"I know."
"I had it."
"I know that too." He sits back down. His jaw is still set. "Doesn't mean I was going to watch it."
I don't have an answer for that one that doesn't give away more than I want to give, so I eat my fries instead.
Holt's knee finds mine under the table and doesn't move away. Neither do I.
The drive back is quiet. Not empty.
His hand rests on the shifter. I let mine stay closer to it than it needs to be, and I note the half inch of air between them the whole twenty miles. Neither of us closes it.
By the time we clear his gate, the half inch is doing more than a hand would.
I fall asleep faster than I have any right to, in the downstairs guest room of a house that isn't mine, under a roof that belongs to a man I still don't fully trust, with a dog's weight against the door like he's decided to guard it from the wrong side.
The dream doesn't ask permission. They never do.
His kitchen. His hands. Not the version of him that sat across from me at Nell's with his jaw set, drinking his coffee, but the other one.
The one I watched look at a child's crayon drawing like it was worth more than anything else in this house.
That version of him walks me backward into the counter without a word and lifts me onto it like I weigh nothing.
My legs go around him before I've told them to, and his mouth finds the exact place on my throat that's been burning since a parking lot in the middle of the night.
He doesn't rush it. Even here, even in a dream where I've stopped pretending I have any authority over what my body wants, he takes his time with my neck, my jaw, and the soft place below my ear.
His hands go up under my shirt and spread flat against my ribs and I feel every callus on them.
I say his name in a voice I have never used on another human being.
Then his mouth goes lower. Then his hands. Then I am saying things into the dark of his kitchen that I would arrest myself for in daylight.
I wake disoriented, heart going, the sheets twisted wrong and his name half out of my mouth before I catch it.
My hand is low on my stomach, fingers still inside myself from wanting something that was never actually in this room.
I lie there in the dark hating him.
I'm still soaked and aching in the early morning with a locked door between us. There is no version of today where I sit across that kitchen table from him and pretend my body didn't already decide something my mind hasn't agreed to yet.
Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard gives.
Once. Then nothing.
Just the kind of quiet that means a man is standing very still on the other side of a door, awake at four in the morning for reasons he'd never admit to either.
I lie there with my heart still going and listen to him not knock.
My hand finds the door handle in the dark. I don't turn it.
But I don't let go for a long time.